


The Washing Line

by Jeannie Peneaux (JeanniePeneaux)



Category: Original Work
Genre: 1950s, F/M, United Kingdom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-01
Updated: 2018-11-01
Packaged: 2019-08-14 07:15:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,947
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16488143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JeanniePeneaux/pseuds/Jeannie%20Peneaux
Summary: Sometimes, the most mundane objects can become our most treasured possessions. Precious memories, built up over a lifetime, can turn even a drab and dull old washing line into something worth holding on to.





	The Washing Line

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not sure what genre I'd put this in, it is not my usual romantic fluff. If there was a category for 'experimental' I would probably chuck it in there with a sub-division of 'maudlin'. 
> 
> Essentially, this brief (unbeta'd) piece was inspired by a conversation I overheard when my grandmother came to live with us for the last few years of her life. I didn't quite comprehend emotional attachment to possessions at that age but as I have grown older, I have gradually come to see it more and more from her point of view. 
> 
> I don't like to send you off into this with a cheery hope that you enjoy it, rather I shall say that I hope you make it to the end and that you don't think it a total waste of your precious reading time. ;)

Maud was given her washing line as a present, along with a bag of pegs, on the day she married Peter. It was a gift, sent from Scotland, by an almost forgotten great-aunt. She had smiled when she opened the brown, string tied, parcel after her honeymoon was over and wrote a letter thanking the lady for her kindness.  
  
Peter, young and agile, strung up the line across the garden of their first home--while Maud stood below in her salmon pink housecoat to hold the ladder steady. Her first load of washing (seven shirts belonging to her husband) were soon after pegged up neatly across the line. She stood back, once she was done, with a certain amount of satisfaction in her work. She admired them for a full minute before heading back indoors to peel the potatoes for their evening dinner together.  
  
It was far longer than Maud would have liked before the line was full, but eventually, after a few years and a tiny shroud had been pegged up some ten months earlier, a basket of little white baby vests joined the white shirts to flap about in the breeze on a bright April day.  
  
The line was rarely empty in those days, Maud would dash out in between rain showers to peg up yet more muslin cloths or square terry nappies while the baby cried and Peter’s visiting mother called out for another cup of stewed tea to be brought her.  
  
Maud believed in counting her blessings, it was what her own mother had always lived by, and so whenever she felt tired or weary of pegging out those square nappies that never seemed so white as Peter’s old mum used to get them, she remembered that little shroud for her first baby and how it had flapped mournfully in the breeze to dry the day before they buried him. It hadn’t seemed right somehow, to let the length of white cloth share the line with anything else, however frugal she liked to be with the washing water.

It didn’t seem so bad then, having to put up all those nappies, when she thought of that.  
  
The neighbours, who liked to poke their heads over the wall to keep an eye on Maudie Robinson, had smiled at her sometimes, when they saw her dashing out madly to the little, paved garden, to fetch in the washing at the first sign of rain. It became a running joke, in a way, Maudie Robinson is in the garden--better get the washing in, it’ll rain in a bit.  
  
Peter heard that joke, of course, and had fondly told his house-proud wife of it. She didn’t believe in idle gossip, her Mother hadn’t indulged in it after all, but she had rolled her eyes and commented that one day she’d send Peter out with the washing to give them something to really talk about.  
  
Peter had laughed at that and said he wouldn’t know where to begin. His wife, their toddler awkwardly resting on one hip against Maud’s pregnant belly and flicking a tea towel as she talked, had remarked with some asperity that she had not precisely had to attend university in order to learn such things herself.  
  
They got on with each other alright, each fulfilling the role that society dictated that they should. If Maud thought that she might make a fine rent collector herself, given that she knew nearly every neighbour in their Leicester street, she never said so but made sure that Peter had a cup of tea ready when he came in and a footstool with a chair pulled up for the evenings after dinner. She sometimes thought that the hardest thing about being a wife was how often she had to bite her lip whenever Peter said stupid things, she learnt to draw her bottom lip between her teeth and head out to the garden to hang out yet more washing. It wasn’t his fault after all, that he occasionally patronised her--given his mother’s views on women you’d often think she wasn’t one herself.  
  
They took it with them, that washing line, when they moved to a bigger house, with a spare bedroom on the outskirts of town and the neighbours there too learnt that Mrs. Robinson (it was that sort of area) was always first out to the garden, basket on her hip when the weather was going to be fine.  
  
A few more years raced by and there were three sets of grey school uniforms on that line, two pinafores and a pair of trousers. They couldn’t afford more than two sets each for the children and so once she had walked her little ones to the school of a morning, Maud would be in a mad dash to get the spare set clean again for the morrow.  The children would string up an old bed sheet in the summer, and make a tent as their den, or they’d have half the neighbourhood kids round and use the line as a net to play badminton.  
  
They were Maudie’s happiest days, she thought later on. So very busy that she hardly seemed to have a moment to rest in between jobs but full of childish giggles and smiles.  
  
It was inevitable really, that some years later a wedding veil would be hung out on that line, its fine weave softly diffusing the bright sunlight of August as Maud carefully pegged it out. Her girl was marrying, she couldn’t regret it, not really. He was a fine young man she had chosen, even Peter approved of him. Soon there would be grandchildren she hoped.  
  
Gradually, one by one, the children left their house and Maud found that once again her washing line was not so full anymore. Jane had been bought a fancy new tumble drier and laughed fondly at her old Mum for going to the trouble every other day of getting a load pegged out. There was no need now, to wash each day, it was almost sad in a way, but Maud found time to do things that she had always promised herself she would when she retired.  
  
She had a shock, when she came downstairs one evening, having been putting away the carefully ironed bedsheets in the airing cupboard to find Peter sat very still, too still, in his chair and she had _known_ , even before she rushed to check his pulse, that she would not find one.  
  
A sober, unhappy Maudie washed, for the very last time, Peter’s white shirt to bury him in. A blue suit, one that he had worn, so long ago now, to a wedding somewhere. He did look so handsome in blue.  
  
It was a windy day when she hung out that shirt and she had to double peg it so that it didn’t fly off the line. It was bone dry in no time, that shirt, but she left it there all day, not wanting to take it down somehow. Seeing it up there, flapping madly in the breeze made her feel as though her husband of forty-two years was still in the house somewhere, pottering around with his soldering iron or grumbling at the newspaper.

Following that, there were a lonely two years for Maudie, she took to taking in washing for the busy working mother next door who didn’t have the time to do it herself. Maud would’ve done it for free, she did so hate to see only her dresses pegged out in the garden.  
  
Her children were good to her, she gave them credit for that, they popped round to check on her every few days, and made sure she had somewhere to go at Christmas time. It was a lonely life, to be sure and some days she found that her voice sounded rough from unuse when she walked to the shop in the afternoon and spoke for the first time that day. Her steps were slower now than they used to be, but she still refused to take the bus into town.  
  
The first time she fell, for seemingly no reason at all, she got back up again some minutes later and shook her head at herself. Her grandson, a fine young man of fifteen, called in later that day for some Welsh cakes and to check on her, had looked upset at the sight of her bruised face.  
  
Jane, predictably, had found an excuse to come and see her the very next day and whisked her off to the doctors. Maud tried not to be offended, it was sweet really, the way her girl was worried for her, but really, she was quite capable of looking after herself, wasn’t she?  
  
The second time she fell, she didn’t get back up again so quickly. Her neighbour, delivering a load of washing to be done, looked in at the window and saw her on the floor. A fractured hip, said the doctors, and a very small stroke.  
  
They had wanted her to move into a care home really, but Maud didn’t want to go there. Full of strangers and badly aired sheets, if she was any judge. She told her children, with unusual snappishness for her, that care homes were places to put old inconvenients until you could more conveniently move them onto the churchyard.  
  
Jane had looked wounded at that, and Maud almost felt guilty. She did feel guilty when Jane begrudgingly blocked up half her front room for her and said that she had better come and live with her. She had never wanted to be a burden. How times had changed from when Peter’s mother had just assumed that she would live out her days in the family home and everyone else had just accepted that it was what happened. She had been a good daughter in law, she had never complained, not really.  
  
It was a squeeze, getting her most treasured furniture into that little front room. She had to let go of the bed, of course, never mind that she’d had it when she and Peter had got married and of course they didn’t need two three piece suites in one house, did they?

She absently asked Jane to untie her line for her, on that last day in her own house, and bring it in for her. It was strange to walk about the place now that it was empty of furniture.

  
Jane laughed, “But Mum, what do you need _that_ old thing for? I’ve got a tumble in the house and a rotary if you really want your things line dried. I’ll take it down, but we _really_ don’t need it you know-- I don’t suppose even the charity shop would want it either, thinking about it. It’ll have to go in the bin.” She dashed out into the garden to untie it at both ends and for a moment Maud thought of the years she had had it and what it meant to her. She stiffened her mouth and tried to blink back the tears.  
  
She couldn’t expect them to understand it, not really, but thinking of it being cast carelessly in the bin made her feel very glum, as though her whole life was being tossed along with it.  
  
Jane’s husband popped his head around the door frame and sent his wife a questioning look when he caught sight of his mother-in laws-expression and Jane spoke briskly in answer, as though her mother were not there.  
  
“She’s upset over the washing line, love. Who gets attached to a _washing_ _line_? Come on, I think that’s the last of the rubbish cleared, let’s go.”


End file.
